Fixing asymmetry in data governance was a topic mentioned in the Wednesday webinar. Perhaps I misunderstand what this means, but in our current economic system large corporations, such as Google, benefit from hoarding the information they are collecting from us and other companies, and only selectively releasing it back to the rest of us. To me it looks like that fixing this problem would require fixing the economic system itself.

Democracy is in crisis, or at least so we are told. Here in Finland, we had the so-called Parliament of the Future yesterday at Porvoo, with speeches from Jeremy Heimans, Pia Mancini, and others.  Even the government of Finland held its first public cabinet meeting ever there.

Now, according to Wikipedia, democracy is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power. But what is this power, and who do exercises it in practise?

It’s said that blockchains will dramatically transform the world. But is this just hype? Yes and no.

Blockchain technology is indeed in the Gartner Hype Cycle. By googling the words ‘blockchain’ and ‘revolution’, you’ll discover that blockchains will revolutionise the housing market, the financial sector, historiography, energy production, consumption, and even the entire world.

It has been estimated that there will be tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet in a few years. This will result in very large amounts of data, including “raw” data from sensors, cameras, etc; processed and annotated data resulting from such data. At the same time, it looks extremely likely that the large majority of this data will be kept private. Data does not move. So far we have failed to create proper markets for data, and there are reasons why it may remain so.